The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  Corrine hung up and called the Port Washington sergeant again. His name was Mike Netter. She wondered if he got as many cracks about his name as she did.

  She started the conversation by letting him know that Janice Martinez had finally gotten back to her. This, after all, was his case, not hers. “She hasn’t talked to Kerry since fifteen fifteen on Wednesday. Any new information on your end?”

  “Talked to a friend of hers at work—girl named Samantha Hicks. She said Kerry was in on Wednesday, out yesterday and today. She didn’t know much more. She said she couldn’t think of any reason she’d be gone except the stress of everything that was happening—first the work trouble, plus the rape, then the media attention, not to mention a breakup. Believe me, I got an earful.”

  Corrine’s mind was swirling with questions. She scribbled key words on her notepad so she wouldn’t forget them.

  “She told this friend Samantha about the rape after it happened?” Kerry said she never spoke to anyone about it until she reported it to Corrine.

  “No, sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that. Samantha only heard about it when everyone else did, at that big press conference the lawyer held.”

  “Did she say what the problems were at work?”

  “Nah. Pretty vague. Something about Kerry being in the doghouse—quote, unquote—for the last few years.”

  That timing lined up with what Kerry had told Corrine about her affair with the company’s CEO, Tom Fisher.

  “And what about the breakup? Was that also a few years ago?”

  “She said Kerry started talking about the dude maybe five months ago. She referred to him as Jay, but never gave a last name and kept blowing her off about getting to meet him. Samantha even asked her once, point-blank, if the guy might be married. I heard all about how Kerry was smart in every way, except she falls head over heels for the wrong guys and lives her whole life around them. I’ve got a sister like that—anyway, Kerry stopped talking about the guy around the time the news of her complaint against Powell came out. So now I got to figure out who Jay is. Didn’t find anyone by that name in her cell phone, and that seems weird. I’ll have my tech guy look at it to see if maybe it all got deleted. And, oh shit—I still need to find that delivery guy from the restaurant.”

  Corrine hung up, trying to quell the worry building in the back of her mind. Kerry was a beautiful, successful single woman. Of course she probably had a boyfriend. There’s no reason that would have come up in conversation with Corrine. And maybe Kerry was secretive about him at work because she’d already been churned through the gossip mill over her affair with Tom Fisher.

  But she couldn’t ignore the warning signs. If Jason Powell was telling the truth about an affair with Kerry, she might have referred to him as “Jay” around the office to keep the relationship on the down-low.

  She had told Brian King that it really didn’t matter to her whether Kerry had had an affair with Jason, but now that the evidence was sitting there, she wanted to know the truth. But the missing-person case belonged to Port Washington Police, and her case against Powell was on hold. Corrine didn’t have an angle to work.

  Corrine walked the twenty feet to her lieutenant’s office and tapped on the open door. After she filled him in on what she knew about Kerry’s disappearance, he said what she expected: Let Port Washington handle the investigation, and in the meantime hope they find her, alive and well.

  She couldn’t argue with his logic, but she was still standing in his doorway.

  “Damn it, Duncan. I got detectives I have to yell at to do more work, and now I’m yelling at you to give it a rest. Go home.”

  “It’s only two o’clock.”

  “Not literally. I mean—Jesus, get out of here. If she doesn’t turn up in the next day or two, we can talk again. Until then, she’s Long Island’s problem.”

  Corrine was at her desk an hour later when the number for the main switchboard at the district attorney’s office appeared on her cell phone screen. “Duncan.”

  “It’s King.” He was back to being King now, not Brian. She preferred it that way.

  She started to fill him in on her conversation with Sergeant Netter, but he interrupted.

  “The pictures of Kerry’s wrists—how do we have those files?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how did we physically get them? She took the photos herself, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how’d she send them to you? E-mail? Text? Did you plug in her phone? Like, technically, how did we get them? You gave them to me as jpeg files.”

  Corrine woke up her computer and looked through old e-mails to jog her memory. “Yeah, she e-mailed them to me as attachments.”

  “Straight from her phone? Right in front of you?”

  “No. She showed them to me on her phone and sent them to me when she got home. Why?”

  “Because Olivia Fucking Randall swears there’s a problem with them, but won’t tell me how she knows that. Specifically, she wants to confirm the date the photographs were taken.”

  “I’m looking at the files on my computer. The date on my files is May 19, but that’s when she sent them to me.”

  “Well, I just learned way more than I wanted to about digital photographs from our geek here. It looks like Kerry exported the original photograph into a jpeg file before she sent it to you, which is why the date on the file is the day she filed her complaint. But if you look at the photo’s properties, it says the image is from the night of April 10, which is the night she says he assaulted her at the W. No problem, right? Except Olivia’s saying you can easily change that on any Mac. She’s demanding that we produce the actual device used to take the photographs so she can examine the microdata to see if the date was changed.”

  “She thinks Kerry took the pictures later and lined them up with the date we’d have hotel footage.”

  “That’s my guess. Please tell me you looked at Kerry’s wrists the day she made the complaint.”

  Corrine closed her eyes. “Of course not. She said the assault was six weeks earlier. And before you ask, she was wearing a long-sleeved dress. I wouldn’t have noticed if she’d still had the marks.”

  “Damn it.”

  “I found out something else that’s not going to make you very happy either.” She summed up her reasons for believing that Kerry’s boyfriend, “Jay,” might have been Jason Powell.

  “And you said before, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t think before that she might be lying about the date of those pictures. The guy with the PD in Port Washington mentioned looking at contacts in Kerry’s phone, so he must have gotten a warrant to unlock it. Let me call him.”

  Netter picked up immediately.

  “You still have Kerry’s phone there?”

  He said that he did.

  “Can you do me a favor and look through her photographs? I’m looking for April tenth.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, I got a picture of a meatball pizza on April eighth, and a picture of Snowball four days later. What am I looking for?”

  “Three pictures of injuries on her wrists. Scroll through and see if you can find anything. Maybe it’s closer to May nineteenth.”

  “Nope, nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You want to drive out here or what? I’m telling you, it’s not here.” Kerry must have deleted the photos after she e-mailed them to Corrine. “And I got hold of that restaurant guy. He’s out surfing in Montauk today, but he’s coming back tomorrow to work a shift. I’m supposed to talk to him at four.”

  Tomorrow was Saturday, her day off. Fuck it. What else was she going to do? “Do you mind if I come out and meet him with you?”

  “No skin off my back.”

  46

  “A jury would let me walk if I knocked you into a coma right now.” The nice thing about Susanna was that I never needed to wonder what she was act
ually thinking. “No offense, but I want to run your life until you come to your senses.”

  We were in her apartment on Central Park South. It was Saturday, the only day when she didn’t have studio obligations. When I arrived at eleven, she had her sideboard covered with Bloody Mary mix and vodka, lox and bagels, caviar and blinis, and a bottle of chilled and very expensive champagne. She told me she splurged because I had been living like a hermit for nearly a month. But now the caviar and blinis were gone, I was picking at the remaining lox and capers, and she was threatening to knock me out for defending Jason.

  “For all we know, she’s turned up by now,” I said. “I mean, she slept with my husband. She could be hooking up with anyone for a night or two.”

  “‘Turned up’? I don’t think an NYPD detective would show up at your door if they thought she was off on a romantic sojourn.”

  I had filled Susanna in on Detective Duncan’s visit to the house, as well as the alibi I ended up offering for Jason. Jason was back at the house with me now, and he, Colin, and I had gotten our stories straight. We even printed out evidence of Spencer’s call to my phone and the receipt from my movie rental for Olivia.

  Susanna sounded like a prosecutor, laying out Jason’s motive to kill Kerry Lynch. His criminal case was only paused for a month. The woman had filed a civil suit seeking millions of dollars in damages. His career, reputation, and future hung in the balance.

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. We’re talking about Jason. He didn’t kill anyone.”

  “People get pushed to the brink and do things you never expect. I mean, I never thought you’d lie to the police. You not only lied for him, you dragged Spencer into it. And you tripled down on it by giving all those documents to Jason’s lawyer. It’s one thing to stand by his side, Angela, but that’s obstruction of justice. You’re affirmatively doing something wrong to cover up for him.”

  “It’s not ‘covering up for him’ if he was at Colin’s house. Whether he was at our place or Colin’s is irrelevant. The point is, he wasn’t anywhere near Kerry Lynch’s.”

  “Why are you so certain of that? You know Colin. He’s convinced Jason is innocent. If he thinks vouching for him will put your mind at ease, he would totally lie for him.”

  If I had to bet money, I’d say Colin was telling the truth about being with Jason. But if I had to bet my arm? I wouldn’t take that wager. I didn’t know where Jason was Wednesday night, in that sense of the word.

  “I can’t explain it, Susanna. When you’ve got a cop standing right there, asking ‘Where was your husband?,’ you just start talking. I’m actually sort of proud of myself that I managed to lie so strategically. I could’ve screwed it up royally.”

  “Well, that’s comforting. If this all goes south, maybe you can run a flimflam racket from prison.”

  “I’m not going to prison.”

  “You lied to a detective. How many times do I have to say that before it sinks in?”

  “Maybe you should have bought less hooch if you wanted me to pay attention to reality.” I refilled my flute, even though it wasn’t empty yet.

  “I’m not kidding, Angela. The last time we talked, it sounded like you were starting to realize Jason might have another side to him, including the way he treats you. Now you’re back to being his biggest defender.”

  I put my glass down and looked her directly in the eye. “Trust me. I am not a fan of his right now. What he did to me was bad. Really bad. And he’s no angel. But I’m not willing to use the word you want me to use for what happened between us that night. And he’s definitely not a murderer. Just the thought of it is ridiculous. Are you telling me that you can picture Jason—our Jason—driving out to that woman’s house, killing her somehow, and hiding her body in the woods somewhere?” I heard my own voice shake. I didn’t want to let my mind picture the scene.

  She held my gaze and then looked away and shook her head.

  “Okay, good. We at least agree on that. My husband’s not a murderer. Cheers!”

  “I’m only looking out for you.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Susanna, I know that!”

  She flinched. I had never snapped at her like that before. I reached over and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “I’m so sorry. I just want this to be over.”

  “Well, what if it’s not?”

  “It will be at some point.”

  “You need to protect yourself before then. Just tell me this: If the DA pulls you into a grand jury and asks you where Jason was, what are you going to do?”

  She kept pressing me until I finally answered. “I wouldn’t lie under oath.”

  “You’re sure? You promise?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t cross that line. But they’re not going to do that. Stop worrying. That girl—woman, Kerry, whatever—she’ll turn up any second.”

  I was doing my best to sound confident, and the alcohol was helping. But inside, I knew my entire life was about to change. It had to.

  After two cups of coffee and a cleaning frenzy, I was feeling nearly sober by the time Jason got home. The entire contents of the pantry were emptied on our kitchen table, countertops, and floor. I had purged a garbage bag full of half-eaten packages of nuts, chips, crackers, spaghetti, hot cocoa, oatmeal—everything that needed to go—and had a plan to organize what was left. Two boxes of Nicorette were set aside near the doorway.

  “Are we having a food drive?”

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  He checked his phone. “It was off.”

  His phone was always off.

  “I want you to go to Colin’s. He said he’ll wait for you there.” I finished wiping down the final shelf. Not a single bread crumb or grain of rice in sight.

  “Are we fighting again? I thought we were fine.” So much had changed in the three days since I’d thrown him out of the house to stay with Colin for the night.

  “Just go talk to Colin. I don’t want to have this conversation. He’ll explain it to you.”

  “Is this about Kerry again? You can’t possibly think I hurt someone—”

  I was focusing on my stacks of organic, low-sodium chicken broth as if I were constructing a landmark bridge.

  “Please. It will all make sense once you’re with Colin. If you don’t agree with me, you can come back, and we’ll talk it out.”

  “Angela—”

  “Just go. I promise. Put on your economist hat. You’ll see, objectively, it’s the right thing to do.”

  I was already crying by the time I heard the front door shut, picturing the scene that was going to play out when Jason got to Colin’s apartment.

  I had called Colin as soon as I got home from Susanna’s. He explained it to me once again: if I filed for divorce before a civil judgment against Jason was rendered, our divorce could proceed as if we were any normal couple going our separate ways. The burden would be on any creditor of Jason to come after me, arguing that we had only gotten divorced as a way to shelter assets from liability. I could play the finally-had-it-up-to-here-wife card. After all, the kindest version of the facts was that Jason had been a serial adulterer. Under the circumstances, who else would have put up with all of this until now except me?

  To an outsider, it would sound cruel—asking my husband’s best friend, the man I’d cheated with three days ago, to serve the divorce papers. But after what I’d learned about Jason in the last month, I didn’t know what a “normal” process was for us anymore. Colin was exactly the right messenger, because he loved us both.

  I had no idea what was going to happen to Jason, either in criminal court or civil. The only thing I knew was that I had to protect myself, and mostly I had to protect Spencer. I would take half of our assets, and I would take Spencer.

  And if Jason asked about “us,” I’d reassure him that he had been Spencer’s father all these years without legal documentation. We could be whatever we wanted to each other, regardless of a piece of paper.

  I was halfway
done stacking the pantry when my phone rang. It was the realtor who had sold us the carriage house two years earlier, returning my call. She was coming over the next day to take a look around before setting a list price.

  47

  Corrine left Harlem at exactly 2:31 p.m. on Saturday for Port Washington, making a point to mark her time. She arrived at Kerry Lynch’s house at 3:12 p.m. Departing from Greenwich Village would have been farther. Saturday-afternoon traffic was probably worse than a Wednesday night. So forty minutes minimum from Jason Powell’s house to here was a good estimate, if he had traveled by car.

  She had already searched the data from the license-plate readers on the bridges and tunnels, looking for any evidence that Powell’s Audi wagon had left Manhattan on Wednesday. She didn’t find a hit. In theory, he could have gone by train or used a different vehicle, but, in her gut, Corrine wasn’t feeling it.

  The first time she went to Kerry’s house, she hadn’t realized how isolated it was. Now that Kerry was missing, she was certain that someone could come and go without a neighbor noticing.

  A marked Port Washington police car pulled to the curb behind her a few minutes after she arrived. The man who stepped out was younger than she had expected, based on their phone calls. He was probably in his late thirties, with dark brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “I brought you doughnuts, Duncan.” He extended a half-dozen box of Krispy Kremes, and they each helped themselves to one. “Come on, humor me, tell me I’m the very first person to make that joke.”

  She finished swallowing before answering. “You should know I hate puns, but I love a good doughnut, Netter, so you get a pass.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He led the way behind the house, removed two ribbons of crime-scene tape, and opened the back door. He held out an arm to stop her from walking any farther than halfway through the kitchen.

  “Have you contacted her family?” Corrine asked.

  “Mom’s passed, Dad’s got Alzheimer’s in Indiana. Estranged from a brother there. From what we can tell, she was all about her job. Some friends at work, like Samantha, but just casual socializing outside of the office. Not anyone close.”